A multilingual screen reader in Indian languages

Abstract

Screen reader is a form of assistive technology to help visually impaired people to use or access the computer and Internet. So far, it has remained expensive and within the domain of English (and some foreign) language computing. For Indian languages this development is limited by: availability of Text-to-Speech (TTS) system in Indian languages, support for reading glyph based font encoded text, Text Normalization for converting non standard words into standard words, supporting multiple languages. In this paper we would discuss how to handle these issues in building multilingual screen reader in Indian languages.